Last Wednesday, the Cat in the Cream was packed with students chatting under the venue’s familiar twinkling lights, nibbling on cookies, drinking tea, and anxiously waiting for their peers to come on stage and take off their clothes.  It might seem unconventional, but shows like these have become a celebrated tradition at Oberlin over the past four years since Oberlin’s own burlesque troupe, OBurlesque, was founded.  Burlesque is a style of performance that is broadly satirical, parodic, and theatrical in nature. The term usually refers to strip routines in which the dancer plays at sexuality through exaggerated character routines or comedic bits.  “So basically, the classic burlesque is kind of old-...

Last Thursday night, students and passersby might have noticed a series of protest messages and art projected onto Mudd Center’s East-facing wall. With the help of a 10,000-lumen projector and a generator, the library was shrouded in a spectacle of still images and moving frames depicting the history of student protest at Oberlin. The projections — a collaboration between students in the classes Creative Interventions and From Bandung to Black Panthers: The Past, Present and Future of Third...

Oberlin’s annual Friendship Festival, now in its 10th year, will take place this Monday in Wilder Main Space. Featuring crafts, guest speakers, free food from Aladdin’s, and raffle prizes, the event is sponsored by the Oberlin Friendship Circle. It comes out of of 12 years of friendship studies at Oberlin and aims to celebrate friendship as the antithesis of war, prejudice, isolation, and hate.  For Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, Presidential Scholar in Islamic Studies and the Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies, the annual Friendship Festival is also a culmination of over three decades dedicated to studying international relations and friendship. Before coming to Oberlin, Mahallati served...

Oberlin Spectrum has been filling Instagram feeds with looks from POC since November 2017, with the goal of providing a fashionable safe space for students of color. Originally a personal project, the page has grown exponentially in recent months. The creators have introduced submissions, broadened their understanding of the meaning of representation, and begun seeking a greater presence on campus. College junior Sheng Kao originally created the account. She began collecting photos from people...